Thursday, November 26, 2009

Despite all its inconveniences and quirks, the bus is my favorite place to read. At home there’s always some other medium blaring but each and every day I have two solid hours to lose myself in a story. I’ve made - and continue to make - lots of mistakes when it comes to choosing what to read, though, so here are a few examples of what makes for bad bus reading:

Books that require translation. At the moment I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and it is goood. The problem is that every third sentence contains either a Spanish word I don’t know or, more embarrassingly, an English word I don’t know. Reading this at home with one eye on dictionary.com is ideal. Reading a paragraph 17 times, partially out loud to oneself on the bus, trying to put words in context or guess at their Latin roots is…less than ideal.

Books that induce vertigo. I know I recently mentioned House of Leaves in another post but it especially applies here. Any book you have to flip through, rotate or hold up to a mirror is a no-no. Plus HoL is big and unwieldy. That’s bad too.
Overly humorous or tragic stories. This is one rule I still can’t bring myself to follow, which means I’m often either laughing hysterically (and looking crazy) or sobbing like a baby (and looking crazy.) Emotional reactions may be personally satisfying but they really don’t endear one to fellow bus riders, who tend to be skeptical, being borderline insane themselves.

I'm thinking that, while my Tumblr site has been a great way to break into regular blogging, it's not the most convenient platform for what I'm trying to accomplish (publishing original content rather than gathering and redistributing it.) So I'm trying my hand at Blogger. It seems like it might be an issue importing all of my old posts from Tumblr, so I'm sure I'll be consulting plenty of folks on that. For now I will do dual posts and link to the full content if it happens to run over Tumblr's character limit.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Growing up, whenever I was bored in class (often) I’d indulge in a bizarre, recurring fantasy. (Just to be clear, I know that this is absolutely ridiculous and not especially funny, but its description is important back story.) I’d imagine myself standing up and running full speed to the front of the classroom, where I would smack into the chalkboard and fall down, pretending to knocked out. When the teacher and my classmates rushed to help I would wait until they were all standing over me and then whip open my eyes, scream like a banshee, jump up and run out of the classroom. I imagined people would be stunned, then amused, then arrange a psych consult for me. In retrospect I wish I had gone through with it and gotten that obviously necessary counseling, because the fantasy is back and it’s starting to affect my bus experience. If, god forbid, I forget my book I will spend the entire ride picturing similarly unhinged moments. Not just screaming and running, but also more mischievous stuff like ringing the bell for every stop and then acting innocent or walking up and down the aisles tapping everyone on the head. I’m not going to do any of this, of course. So does that mean I’m insane for coming up with this nonsense in the first place or sane for suppressing the urge to use the metal bars lining the bus as a jungle gym? I just don’t know. Sharing things like this is probably important therapy, just to let off a little of the crazy. It helps to a point, but still…if you see me on the bus and I have a devilish smile on my face, watch out. Your head may be first.